September 30, 2026
Today, September 30, is the last day of the
month. In Canada it is also the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
I’ve often mentioned in my essays that
Canada is by no means perfect. The biggest blot in our history, in my opinion,
can be summed up with two words that in this country don’t need a lot of
explanation: residential schools.
In the 1800s in Canada, church-run boarding
schools were instituted. Attendance at these schools was mandatory, by law. The
purpose of these schools was to house and “educate” indigenous children, with a
purpose of blotting out their heritage and identities. It was an act of cultural
genocide. The last residential school in this country was finally closed in the
1990s. And over the course of the program, over one hundred and fifty thousand
children were taken from their homes, and thousands of them either died or were
simply never returned to their families. You see, also by law, the principals
of the schools became the legal guardians of the children under their roof.
And under that authority, the children
were mistreated and horribly abused.
In 2008 the Canadian government instituted
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission under the Indian Residential Schools
Settlement Agreement. Reparations were made and in 2021 the new national
holiday was created.
I am far from being an expert on this
subject. So for anyone wanting to know more, you can go here: https://nctr.ca/about/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-of-canada or you can go here: https://www.irsss.ca
I like to think that generally speaking, our
hope over time—as a society and as an individual—is to improve. Improve
ourselves, our communities, our world. I have long believed that life is a
journey. For each of us, a journey toward something that is important to
ourselves, or our cultures.
One of the aims of an author writing a novel
wherein people are front and center, is that by the end of the story you’ve
told, your characters have grown. They have evolved. The writer’s job is to
make you root for the character. The best novels engender a sense of accomplishment
within the reader for having traveled that path of discovery or redemption with
the character.
Art imitates life. If it didn’t, art
wouldn’t hold much interest for us. My job as an author is to create characters
that you can identify with, and love, and therefore care about them. If I fail,
you won’t finish my book.
There are no do-overs in life. When we
screw up, and we all do, what has gone wrong can not be taken back. And
sometimes, all that’s left are grief and ashes.
We learn about past events, we learn our
own histories, and we learn things that make us feel uncomfortable. That’s a
part of living. Honest living, day to day. We cannot go back and undo the
injustices we discover in our own history.
We cannot undo the damage done to those
children, and those families. What we can do? We can and should educate
ourselves about what happened. We can and should seek to understand the damage
done and the impact of it.
And perhaps the most important thing of
all? We can, and we should, find empathy within ourselves which often comes
with a real resolve to do better, going forward.
That is what true progress is all about.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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